butchering immense numbers of the inhabitants, without regard to age or sex. Ethelwulf and his generals fought several battles with them; but the English were generally worsted. Meanwhile, to relieve himself in part from the cares and toils of government, to which he was but little suited either by capacity or inclination, Ethelwulf, about the year 841, resigned a part of his dominions, consisting of Kent, Essex, and Sussex, to Athelstan, whom some authorities call his legitimate, others his natural son, and others his brother. Athelstan reigned conjointly with his father till the year 852, when he was slain in a great battle fought with the Danes at Okeley in Surrey, in which, however, the English were victorious. Ethelwulf now resumed the entire sovereignty, refusing for a long time to share it with his eldest son Ethelbald, who was of a restless and ambitious character, and, now that Athelstan was dead, was importunate to be allowed to take his place. At last, however, the father, whose mind had of late been turned very much to devotion, terrified by the apprehension of a civil war which his son's intrigues threatened to excite, yielded him by treaty, not the inferior place of king of Kent, but-keeping that to himself the throne of Wessex and the sovereignty of England. This arrangement was made in 855; and two years after, Ethelwulf died, leaving besides Ethelbald three younger sons, Ethelbert, Ethelred, and Alfred, to the first of whom he bequeathed the kingdom of Kent. Ethelwulf, accompanied by his son Alfred, had paid a visit to Rome in the year 855, and, returning home through France, had married Judith the daughter of Charles the Bald, the reigning king of that country; but all his children were born of his first wife Osburga, the daughter of Oslac, his cupbearer, a West Saxon nobleman of illustrious descent. Ethelbald lived about two years and a half after the death of his father; and on his decease in 860 the whole of England again became one kingdom, under the sovereignty of Ethelbert. Immediately after Ethelbert's accession, the Danes-who had not been heard of for eight years-again made their appearance on the southern coast, and having effected a landing, committed great devastations. From this time till the close of the present reign, the English were engaged in an almost incessant contest with these foreign marauders. Ethelbert died in 866, after a reign of six years, and was succeeded, according to the will of his father, by his next brother Ethelred, who occupied the throne for a period of much about the same length. His short reign, however, was the most disastrous which England had ever known since it was in possession of the Saxons. The repeated incursions of the Danes had so greatly shattered the royal authority, even when Ethelred first mounted the throne, that the inhabitants of the remote district of Northumberland, still remembering their old independence, resolved to make an attempt to free themselves from the yoke which had been imposed upon them by Egbert, and succeeded so far as actually again to place a king of their own selection upon the throne. Beset as he was with foreign enemies, Ethelred was obliged to submit to this revolt against his authority, without even making an attempt to punish or to repress it. The consequences, however, were more dreadful than he had foreseen, both to him and to its authors. It happened that Osbert, the person whom the Northumbrians had chosen for their king, as he was one day returning from hunting, called at the castle of one of his noblemen, the earl Bruern-Brocard, with the beauty of whose wife he was so captivated, that in the absence of her husband, he compelled her by force to submit to his lawless passion: the earl, on learning this cruel injury, swore that he would be revenged, and kept his oath. The atrocity which Osbert had perpetrated was well-calculated to alienate from him the affections of his subjects; and it was not long before the earl succeeded in getting the Bernicians openly to cast off his authority and to choose themselves another sovereign. Nor was this all. A contest commenced immediately between Osbert and his rival Ella, which was carried on for some time with such doubtful success, that at length the latter, instigated by the earl, adopted the fatal resolution of calling in the Danes to his assistance. These bold rovers, whose trade was war, willingly accepted the invitation. A numerous fleet of them entered the Humber, under the command of the two brothers, Hinguar and Hubba-the former of whom, our historians call the king of the nation—and, conducted by Bruern, landed in the territory of Northumberland. This was the commencement of an enterprize which terminated in the actual conquest of a great part of England by these fierce barbarians. All Northumberland was soon subdued and taken possession of by the foreigners, who paid no more respect to the territory of Ella than they did to that of Osbert. Indeed Ella himself lost his life in fighting against them in the great battle of Ellescroft, in which his army was entirely routed. From this time the invaders bore down all opposition; and having first made themselves masters of East Anglia notwithstanding all the efforts that Ethelred could make to stop their progress, they boldly proceeded to attack the king in Wessex itself. It was in vain that Ethelred, assisted by his brother Alfred, made the most heroic exertions to save his hereditary dominions. In the course of one year it is said that he fought nine battles with his assailants; in the last of these, which took place near Whittingham in the year 872, he was mortally wounded, and left the name of king rather than the real possession of a kingdom to his younger brother and companion in arms, Alfred, the incidents of whose lite we are now to relate. : I. POLITICAL SERIES. Alfred. BORN A. D. 849.-DIED A. D. 901. ALFRED THE GREAT was born in the year 849, at Wantage in Berkshire. He is described to have been from his infancy his father's favourite and when he was only in his fifth year Ethelwulf sent him, attended by a splendid train of nobility and others, to Rome, where it is said he was, according to the custom of those times, adopted by the reigning pontiff, Leo IV. as his son, and also, young as he was, 12 Ste Turner, vol. ii. 107. anointed as a king.' A few years after this, he again visited the imperial city accompanied by his father himself, and this time his opening faculties may be supposed to have received many impressions from a scene so unlike any thing he could have witnessed at home, which would prove indelible, and materially influence his future character and conduct. His father died when he was in his eleventh year; and he appears to have lost his mother some years before. He was now, therefore, left to the charge of his step-mother, Judith, a daughter of the king of France, who seems, however, to have acquitted herself admirably of the duty which had thus devolved on her. The only species of literature of which our future royal author yet knew any thing, was the unwritten ballad poetry of his country, to which, as recited by his attendants and playmates, he had from his earliest years loved to listen. But the influence even of such intellectual sustenance as this in awakening both his patriotism and his genius, will not be thought lightly of by any who have accustomed themselves to trace the causes by which generous spirits have been frequently matured to greatness. The body is not fed and strengthened by bread alone;-so neither is the mind only by that sort of knowledge which is conversant but with the literalities of things. The prejudice of a certain philosophism against whatever appeals to the imaginative part of our nature is no wiser than would be a feeling of contempt on the part of a blind man for those who see. True, imagination has its tendencies to evil, as well as to good. And there are also temptations which beset the man who sees, from which he who is blind is exempted. And, universally, in this condition of things, whatsoever may be turned to good may be turned also to evil, and nothing is wholly and irretrievably either the one or the other. But it is the high office of philosophy to be ever so mixing up and combining the elements of power that are in us and around us, as to turn them all to good; none of them were given us to be either lost or destroyed; least of all were our imaginative tastes and faculties-which are the very wings of the mind, whereby it lifts itself to the upper regions of philosophy-made part and parcel of our being, only that they might be stinted in their growth, or left to perish. They were bestowed upon us undoubtedly, like all the rest of our nature, to be educated, that is to say, to have their potency changed from tyrannizing over us, to serving under us, even as the fire, and the water, and the beasts of the field, which also all aspire to be our masters, are converted by art into our most useful ministers and subjects, and made, as it were, to come and lay down their strength at our feet. Our business is to seek not to destroy our imagination, but to obtain the rule over it,—not to weaken, but to direct, its force. He whose imagination is his lord, is a madman; but he, on the other hand, is armed with the mightiest of all moral powers, whose imagination is his wielded and obedient instrument. It was fortunate, we must therefore hold, for Alfred to have had his sensibilities thus early kindled to the love of poetry This was excitement enough to keep his intellectual faculties from wasting away, during the protracted period when he was yet without Asser, 7.-Chron. Sax. 77.--Lingard supposes that Alfred was made to receive regal unction in order to secure his succession to the crown, after his brothers, to the exclusion of their children. the elements of any other education. And who shall say how much, not of the enjoyment merely, but even of the greatness, of his future life was the offspring of that imaginative culture of his youth, which, as it must have smitten his spirit with its first love of heroic deeds, so would often supply it afterwards with its best strength for their performance. He himself at least retained ever after the deepest regard and reverence for that simple lore which had thus been the light and solace of his otherwise illiterate boyhood. Many of his compositions which have come down to us are in verse, and we are told by his friend and biographer, Asser, that not only was the poetry of his native land his own favourite reading, but that, in directing the education of his children, it was to Saxon books, and especially to Saxon poetry, that he ordered their hours of study to be devoted. The indulgence of his parents was probably, in part at least, the cause of his long ignorance of booklearning. But, however this may be, he had reached his twelfth year, Asser tells us, without knowing his letters, when one day his mother showed him and his brothers, a small volume somewhat gaily illuminated, and announced that the book should be the prize of him who should first learn to read it. Alfred immediately put himself into the hands of a teacher, and, although the youngest of the competitors, was in no long time able to claim the promised reward. From this period he continued to be throughout his life so ardent and devoted a reader, that, even when most oppressed with occupation, he was rarely to be found. if he had the shortest interval of repose, without a book in his hand. Up to the time when Ethelred mounted the throne, as related in the preceding historical sketch, Alfred had never succeeded in obtaining from his brothers the property to which he was entitled by his father's will; and, owing to this cause, he seems to have been unable to provide himself either with books or instructors even in the few branches of science and of more refined scholarship which were then cultivated. There is some reason to believe that, in the recklessness produced by the untoward circumstances in which he was thus placed, his noble energies had already threatened to lose themselves in a career of dissipation and profligacy. But both his years at this time, and the steady virtues of his manhood, forbid us to suppose that he could have proceeded very far in such a course. Even after Ethelred became king, he still continued to be deprived of the independent provision which had been bequeathed to him, his brother, who, before his accession, had promised to see him restored to his rights, now excusing himself from performing his intention on the ground of the troubled state of the kingdom, harassed as it was almost continually by those Danish pirates, who had first appeared on its coasts in the reign of Egbert, but had for some years past been in the habit of making their descents in such augmented force as to dispute the possession of the country with its natural occupants. From this date, however, he seems to have been brought forth from the obscurity in which he had hitherto lived; and his brother's estimate of his talents, indeed, is said to have been so great, that he employed him both as his principal adviser or minister in the general government of the realm, and as the com • Men. p. 16.-This must have happened at an earlier period of Alfred's boyhood, for the anecdote is told of his own mother Osburga, and not of his step-mother Judith' mander-in-chief of his armies. In this latter capacity he repeatedly encountered the Danes with various success. At last he allowed himself to be drawn into an engagement with them as they were collected in formidable numbers near Reading; the issue of which threatened to be a total defeat of the English, when a fresh force arrived under the command of the king himself, and so entirely turned the fortune of the day, that the Danes were completely routed with the loss of many of their chiefs. Their disaster, however, was far from driving the invaders from the country; on the contrary, they boldly attacked the two brothers about a fortnight after, and beat them; and this suc cess they followed up without loss of time by another attack, which terminated in a second victory; and in which, as already related, king Ethelred was mortally wounded. The crown, therefore, now fell to Alfred, by whom, however, his original biographer assures us, it was assumed with reluctance. The jewelled circlet, always lined with cares, had almost in this case, indeed, to be won before it could be worn. Scarcely had Alfred laid his brother in the grave when he was again forced to meet the enemy at Wilton. The consequence was a third defeat. It was followed by a treaty, which, however, the Danes, rendered audacious by the consciousness of their strength, are asserted to have regarded just as far as it suited their inclinations or convenience. In the course of a few years Alfred found it necessary again to have recourse to arms; and he now resolved to meet the invaders on their own element, the sea. He accordingly fitted out a fleet, which soon afterwards attacked a squadron of five Danish ships, and took one of them. The foreigners, however, still maintained their position in the country in formidable numbers, quartering, plundering, and laying waste wherever they chose. Finding himself not strong enough to offer them battle, Alfred was obliged in 875 to make a new peace with them, or rather indeed to buy a cessation of hostilities. But the very next year he was forced to renew the war, which, with desperate vigour, he now pushed at once both by sea and land. Collecting all the forces he could, he shut up the army of the enemy in the town of Exeter; but he was saved the risk of actually giving them battle, by the good fortune of his little navy, which in the meantime attacked their fleet, consisting of a hundred and twenty sail; and, aided by a storm which immediately succeeded the conflict, sunk part of the vessels, and drove the rest on shore, so that scarcely a man escaped. Another peace followed this glorious achievement, the enemy being obliged to give hostages. The very year following, however, they suddenly sprung up again in arms; and such was the consternation everywhere spread by this unexpected return of a scourge which now seemed altogether invincible, that utter despair took possession of the heart of the nation; and, while many concealed them selves, or fled from the country, and others submitted to the invaders, none could be found to go forth and make head against them. The kingdom in fact might be said to be conquered. The king himself was obliged to leave his palace, and to take refuge in disguise with one of the keepers of his cattle. It was while he resided in this man's hut that an incident happened with which all our readers are probably fa Chron. Sax. 82, 83. |